If you’re anything like me, you live on your phone. I text, BBM, read and reply to emails, Tweet and Facebook, pay bills, and order stuff and books online through Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Up until a few days ago, i essentially did everything but blog.
I’m a WordPress advocate—well, more like fanatic—and was dismayed by the lackluster official WordPress for BlackBerry app. It was limited. I’ve noticed a trend in “official” apps for services or software being subpar, but that’s another post, entirely.
Anyway, i decided to give the 2-day trial for Wicked Blogging App a spin. It’s a pretty snazzy offering from Screaming Toaster. It took literally 10 seconds to create a Screaming Toaster account and less than a minute to connect to my self-hosted blog (WordPress.com blogs are supported, too).
Note: If you have a self-hosted blog, make sure XML-RPC protocol is enabled under Settings –> Writing or you’ll receive an error when attempting to login to your blog.
I only have a dozen or so blog posts at the moment, so downloading my posts didn’t take long on a typical AT&T Edge connection. Wi-fi was even faster, probably about 10 or so seconds. Posts can be filtered by categories, tags and author. You can even view and reply to recent comments.
All posts are written in HTML mode, so if you need to bold or italicize, or to add a link, you’ll need to be familiar with writing out the respective HTML codes. Before publishing, you can specify the author, tags and categories as you would normally.
There’s an HTML and a web viewer to preview posts. They work well enough to ensure formatting is correct before publishing. Speaking of publishing, make sure to use “Save Draft” if you’re still working on your post and not “Save.” I used the latter, not realizing that “Save” means “Publish.” I had to scramble to a computer to return the post to draft mode because the app doesn’t allow you to unpublish a post, and the BlackBerry browser is too slow. Editing an already published post’s content is the same as editing an unpublished one.
What about pictures? Gotta have pictures! Fortunately, you can attach a photo stored on your phone or snap one. I didn’t have much luck, however, with attaching one, even though the image was drastically smaller than the 200kb limit. I’ll have to play around with it some more.
Another oddity, which caused me to freak out, is the implementation and giddy enthusiasm of the geolocation feature. Geolocation takes your GPS coordinates and puts it as a link into your post. This can be turned off, but it’s easily dismissed if you’re in a rush to publish (or “save”). For all of my digital diligence and the way i embrace technology, i’ve yet to become a fan of people knowing my location at all times. I flirted with Foursquare for a few months, but only checked in at my usual haunts regularly. All of the GPS features for my apps are turned off, including the hidden BlackBerry one, which i only turn on when i need to use Google Maps, but then it i turn it right back off.
All in all, i’m happy with Wicked Blogging App and believe it’s worth the $30/year price. Purchasing a license was quick, seamless and secure. I’ve now written and published two posts solely using the app, both without any harrowing incident.
I agree with the 4-star rating in BlackBerry App World and encourage you to give it a try.
Enjoy, mobile BlackBerry bloggers!